Merry Christmas, Alex Cross Part 15

The pop the suppressed gun made going off seemed loud to her in the duct. But neither of the other two postal workers reacted until Muttonchops fell to his knees, hands trying to stop the blood from gus.h.i.+ng out of the hole she'd put through his windpipe.

The second postal worker was bald. His pale skull made an easy target for her next shot, which went through the back of his head. The third worker, a thin black guy, seemed to have figured out he was next, because he ducked and ran zigzags across the loading dock, screaming for help.

He didn't get any. Hala's third shot shattered his pelvis as he tried to climb the stairs leading to the main postal facility. His legs buckled, leaving him howling at the bottom of the steps. Her fourth shot hit him in the chest, and he sagged forward.

Hala returned the gun to the tool bag and got out a power screwdriver fitted with a tungsten-coated drill bit. In less than two minutes, she'd reamed out the mounts holding the four screws and gripped the grate by the slats.

She felt the grate come free of the wall, moved it out, and then flicked it hard to her right. It clanged to the floor. After grabbing the tool bag, she wriggled her arms and shoulders free of the duct, looked right below her, and realized she wouldn't need the thin rope she'd brought along.

Hala tossed the tool bag to her left, saw it land in one of the mail hampers. She focused on the hamper fifteen feet directly below her and squirmed free of the hole up to the top of her hips, then rotated so her back faced the wall. She let herself hang down it, felt her hips and legs begin to slide free of the duct.

The instant Hala felt the edge sc.r.a.pe the backs of her calves, she arched her spine, pushed her belly forward, and then let all that tension go in a snapping action. Her legs flipped her out and over the duct. As she fell, she rotated her legs around, as if she were dismounting off the balance beams of her childhood; her head glanced off the wall before she landed in a jolting squat that pulled something sharply in her left hip.

Hala grunted, fought the pain, rolled over the metal rim of the hamper's frame, and got to the floor. A moment later, she had the tool bag. She winced as she went by the dead postal workers, trying to compensate for a torn muscle; the psoas or the iliacus, by the feel of it.

This would not do. She stopped, set the bag down by Muttonchops, dug in her pocket for a baggie with pills she'd stuffed there. She found one ten-milligram OxyContin tablet and an eight-hundred-milligram ibuprofen. One for pain. One for swelling.

The fiery sensation spreading through her hip had not lessened by the time she reached the edge of the loading dock. She flinched as she got down and then crawled backward off the edge of the dock, the cold night breeze on her cheeks, knowing how much it was going to hurt to drop just three feet.

What I feel doesn't matter, she thought as she pushed off. she thought as she pushed off.

But when she landed beside the postal railcar, she felt the pain like a knife shoved into her. Hala gasped and stumbled, dropped the canvas bag, squeezed her eyes shut, and bit her lip to keep from screaming.

CHAPTER

58

WE RAN TO THE MEN'S RESTROOM WHERE I WAS SURE HALA HAD GONE IN disguise. Halfway there, Mahoney heard something in his earbud and slowed to a stop, holding up his hand to me and Bobby Sparks.

"She made a call about eleven minutes ago," he said, looking up at a clock on the station wall. It was 6:36, which put the call at 6:25.

Bobby Sparks grumbled, "It took us eleven minutes to-"

"I can't control the National Security Agency," Mahoney snapped, cutting him off. "In the call, an unidentified female said in Arabic: 'Why?' Unsub male replied in Arabic: 'Four and zero.' End of conversation. We have a rough idea of unsub male's location: not far from where Suitland Parkway meets the Anacostia Freeway."

"He could be coming toward us," I said, looking at the clock.

"Possibly," Mahoney agreed, and he started to move again.

"'Four and zero,'" I said. "What did the unsub male say the first time?"

"'One, four, and zero,'" Bobby Sparks replied.

"How long ago was that?"

"Just after she entered the station," Mahoney said. "It was at five twenty-five."

"So they dropped the one, and an hour has pa.s.sed," I said.

Both FBI agents slowed. "Again," Bobby Sparks said.

"An hour and forty from five twenty-five is seven oh-five," I said. "Forty minutes from six twenty-five is seven oh-five. I think we've got their timetable."

Mahoney paled. "Which means we've got less than twenty-nine minutes to find her."

CHAPTER

59

IT TOOK HALA A GOOD TWENTY SECONDS BEFORE SHE COULD GET HER MUSCLES to relax and her eyes to open. She gritted her teeth at the burning pain in her hip as she looked all around her.

To her left and down the tracks, red lights glowed at intervals all the way to the snow-blanketed mouth of the terminal. Hala could make out, about fifty feet ahead of her, the dark hulks of the suburban MARC trains. She smelled diesel exhaust and heard the rumble of the Acela's engines warming and the chatter of the last few grateful travelers boarding the train bound for New York City.

Hala got out her phone and checked the time: 6:47 p.m. She had eighteen minutes to get into position and get ready. Limping toward the far end of the dark commuter train, she heard the Acela's wheels begin to squeal across the tracks, pus.h.i.+ng north.

She stood in the darkest shadows, feeling the effects of the painkillers start to seep through her as she ripped open the first of the Christmas presents and watched the train leave the terminal. Weary travelers were visible in the lit windows.

Hala wondered if these train pa.s.sengers would look back on this day and feel the way people who'd been late to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 did: confused and haunted by the random circ.u.mstances that had led to their survival.

CHAPTER

60

SEEING THAT THE GRATE ABOVE THE STALL IN THE MEN'S RESTROOM HAD NO screws holding it to the wall, I stepped up on the toilet and yanked at it. It was exactly 6:57. It had taken us that long to clear the restroom and search it.

The grate didn't budge. I used Mahoney's flashlight and shone it through the slats before looking back at him, Bobby Sparks, and Captain Johnson. "Where do these ducts go?" I asked Johnson.

The Amtrak cop squinted at me in disbelief. "You think she got in there?"

"I don't know how else to explain that the grate's been wired shut from inside. So where do they go?"

Johnson looked confused. "I don't know. And I don't think there's anyone from maintenance who can tell us until-"

"Wait, why don't you know this?" Bobby Sparks asked incredulously.

"We control the gate areas and the tracks," the Amtrak cop retorted hotly. "The station's interior is the responsibility of a private management firm in Virginia, but everyone there's got the night off. It's Christmas, for G.o.d's sake."

I gestured angrily at the duct. "Where could could it go? Or, better, what places would be vented by this ductwork?" it go? Or, better, what places would be vented by this ductwork?"

Captain Johnson thought a second, said, "Sbarro, the pizza place that's around the corner here, and then the U.S. Postal Service facility, I guess."

"How big is that?" Bobby Sparks asked.

"Big enough to handle everything coming off Capitol Hill, House and Senate side, and all the federal agencies around here."

"There's no chance anyone from the U.S. Postal Service is working on Christmas," Mahoney said.

"As a matter of fact, there's a skeleton crew in there right now," Johnson said. "I saw them on the loading dock. They're on until ten."

I thought about that a second, then said, "Does the loading dock face First Street or the terminal?"

"Both," the Amtrak officer said. "There's a single steel roll-up door facing the street, and a double that allows access to the tracks."

"She's either escaping to the street or trying to get to the trains," I said, moving toward the door. "Get men to the west end of that terminal, inside and outside. Tell them she's dressed as a male, an Amtrak worker, and should be considered armed and dangerous."

Captain Johnson began to sweat again as he barked orders into his radio. So did Mahoney and Bobby Sparks and I as we all sprinted to the security entrance that led down to the terminal, the loading platforms, and the train tracks.

CHAPTER

61

FEWER THAN FOUR MILES TO THE SOUTH, ACROSS THE RIVER IN ANACOSTIA, A white panel van sporting a sign that said CSX TRANSIT SUPPORT CSX TRANSIT SUPPORT crept through the snow toward the Eleventh Street bridge, heading north into Was.h.i.+ngton. crept through the snow toward the Eleventh Street bridge, heading north into Was.h.i.+ngton.

The driver was dressed in work boots, a blue one-piece work suit similar to the one Hala wore, and a dark blue insulated Carhartt coat. There was a patch on the chest of the coat that said CSX MAINTENANCE SERVICES. CSX MAINTENANCE SERVICES. Below that patch, the name Below that patch, the name HERB HERB had been embroidered. had been embroidered.

His real name was Omar Nazad, but he carried the Maryland driver's license and employee ID of Herbert Montenegro of Falls Church, Virginia. A Tunisian who looked more Eastern European than Maghrebian, Nazad had entered the United States on a student visa to study for his doctorate in chemical engineering at Purdue University. But he had left the school almost immediately, disappearing into this new ident.i.ty courtesy of Al Ayla and Hala Al Dossari.

They'd met six months before in a safe house run by a theater major at Syracuse University. Hala was older than Nazad by almost ten years, but she captivated him with her beauty and her pa.s.sion for the cause. This plan had been their idea, conceived during the long, wet upstate New York spring and expanded and refined during the summer and early fall. Tonight they and the others would see it through, no matter the consequences.

"Brother?" came a male voice from behind Nazad, back in the interior of the van, which was dark but for the glow of a computer screen.

"I hear you, brother," Nazad answered.

"Six minutes," the man replied.

"We'll just make-" Nazad stopped, cursed.

"What is wrong?"

"Police ahead. They've blocked off the left lane to the bridge. Quiet now."

Nazad pulled shut dark drapes that separated the front seats from the van's rear. He rolled slowly by a police officer waving a flashlight.

"Officer," he called. "Is the exit plowed down onto Twelfth Street? I have to check the tracks as it enters the tunnel."

"Exit's plowed, but nothing beyond it," the officer replied. "Hope you've got chains. It's a mess down in there."

"I take my chances," Nazad said, and drove on.

CHAPTER

62

THE PAINKILLERS HAD KICKED IN. HALA POCKETED THE SPOOL OF THIN, ultra-strong fly-fis.h.i.+ng tippet line, picked up the tool bag, and limped in the dark shadows on the other side of the suburban MARC trains, heading toward two longer Amtrak trains that were sitting dead and barely lit in the middle of the huge terminal.

She heard screeching and rumbling at the east end of the station. A freight train was leaving the First Street tunnel, which ran under Capitol Hill toward the CSX tracks and the Navy Yard. She felt a thrill go through her at the idea that this might all proceed according to plan, snow delay or not.

Hala made it to the northernmost end of the first dead Amtrak train, more than one hundred and fifty yards from the U.S. Postal Service loading dock. She rested for a second against the snub nose of the ma.s.sive locomotive, watching the last few cars in the freight train disappear through the terminal mouth, heading toward the Ivy City Yard that was somewhere out there in the snowy darkness. Another train approached the station now.